Jim rants!

The following is a letter to my friend Hans, responding to his note on the fact that we don't seem to have as much global warming' as the reporters and 'green' scientists seem to be presenting to us. With my philosophy it is immaterial what the graphs predict...we're just not living right...

Hi Hans;

My premise is that we need more data...something is happening...something is always happening though. When we rely upon our memories we skew the data a bit, that is human nature. My 'feeling' is that the weather is more dramatic than it was when I was a kid, but we still had hurricanes and blizzards...has this been skewed by dramatically 'closer' news reporting...due to satellite, cell and general proliferation of news reporters around the world? I don't know! We had a kitchen table discussion about the news the other night...is the world a more dangerous place with more and more atrocious acts happening or are we just hearing more about them? Krista and John thought that the troubles in the middle east indicated that there was generally more unrest in the world...I'm not so sure; there were a lot of 'bad' things happening in the former soviet states that never made the light of day, if the reporters weren't in Africa or in the middle east did that make the events there a non-happening? Then there is the general increase in population...disproportionate in poorer areas so that the desperation that breeds violence is higher per capita and the 'newsworthy' events are higher based upon a disproportionate higher amount of desperate poor.

That said, we live in troubled time, like always. The subtle change is that we have become dependent/addicted to systems that are in and of themselves very fragile. Fragile in terms of man-made as opposed to natural...a mountain is pretty hard to knock down...it can be done, but takes a lot of effort. A satellite can be rendered useless with the burning out of a wire finer than a hair...there goes some aspect of communication in the world-wide cell phone network...granted, there is redundancy in the satellite and with other satellites that makes the single wire relatively insignificant. Until there is something the equivalent of a volcano eruption in the micro-electronic world. The volcano can make a mountain disappear in moments...an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse...can be man made or solar created) can make satellites 'disappear' in the same amount of time.

Water, food, energy, communications, medical care, transportation and other systems could have problems that will lead to cascading failures into each of the other areas. Some part of this is exacerbated by our psychological dependence upon the very man made systems we deem to be 'essential' for our daily lives and survival. We have lost site of "long-term" viewpoints. We are several generations away from knowing how to provide for ourselves...heat, water, food and protection are all remote operations for 90% of the westernized world. People will starve to death standing in a field of potatoes because: a) they can't recognize the plant and b) they wouldn't know how to cook a freshly harvested potato.

The energy theme has always relied upon a very short sighted model...'someone' in the future will figure out what to do to make energy once we've burned up the (chronologically ordered...more or less): trees, coal (no we're not out of coal, it was just so environmentally damaging to cities that we welcomed n. gas and oil derivatives as a substitute), petroleum products, n. gas,and radioactive materials. We are smart enough to foretell the future, or at least model several scenarios, we should be able to predict and react to those most likely to happen. We think of peak oil in terms of a few decades, more or less, rather than in millennial terms. Shouldn't we have the respect for the people of the future to live as if we had a finite planet with finite resources?

Conservation is the answer...or at least one of them. Enough babble!

----- Original Message -----
From: Hans-Udo Kurr
To: "James S. Juczak"
Subject: Please show this to Krista, too..
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:51:33 +0000 (GMT)

Jim, ..plus your parents, in-laws and the whole Woodhenge community of realist-idealists. Almost 30 years inside the "United" Nations - where 194 countries' hypocrises brew one heck of a cocktail! - still couldn't kill my optimism & idealism, either. They did show me, though, how idealists are awf'ly vulnerable to "Help me save our planet!" huxters. With that in mind, I'd like to share the plea (see right below) for letting facts trump fantasy, data trump dogma. It comes from Joe D'Aleo, 30+ years a college prof, Weather Channel meteorology director, et al., and now at independent WeatherBell.com, where he partners with my friend Joe Bastardi, former Accuweather Chief Hurricane & Long-Range Forecaster. Here's Joe D': "A few of you have asked me to comment on global temperature reports. As you may know there a lot of stories in the news about the global warming issues where the warministas are getting more and more desparate, as the warming the last 15 years has been well below any of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] projections (in fact we have seen no warming for over a decade) and sea levels continue to fall, not rise. BTW, Michael Mann [creator of the now withdrawn IPCC fantasy graph that pretended world temps had flat-lined since 1,000 A.D., then soared in the late 1900's...like the business end of a hockey stick] of PSU [Pennsylvania State University] gave a talk and said all the actual conditions are at the high end or worse than any IPCC model predictions). His degree are in math and physics, Jim Hansen [head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which somehow managed to become custodian for U.S. & global climatic data] has his degree in Astronomy. Both got into meteorology/climatology late and don't really look at the weather and climate the way JB and I and many of you do. In "When Prophecies Fail," a 1950 book, Leon Festinger predicted this behavior among the 'cultists' when their prophecies fail to materialize (the space ship doesn't come to take them or the world doesn't end). JB and I come at it not from the 190-year-old theory or 100-year computer model standpoint but from the empirical side.. Dr Richard Feynman of Cornell (the alma mater of our two super-hero execs at Weatherbell), in a segment of his class on the scientific method tells it like it is. He describes why JB and I feel the way we do, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b240PGCMwV0&feature=player_embedded . The alarmists say, no, their theory is correct, they are too smart to be wrong. It must be the data that is faulty. We will show what they have been doing to the data to try and make it conform to the models, instead of rethinking the theory and their models. BY THE WAY, the IPCC scientists have already announced that for the next IPCC assessment they have already decided to continue to ignore the sun as a factor, even though since their last report in 2007 many dozens of peer-reviewed papers and experiments in the lab have shown the sun is a key driver. [That should startle none of us, since the solar power that actually floods Earth dwarfs our global energy output by 17,900:1 !!!] Why are IPCC scientists behaving this way? Follow the money: $11B/year worldwide goes to scientists who support the political "green" agenda. Yet the mainstream media and many warmists are fixated on the Heartland Institute's $1.9M spent on climate-change conferences and publications, seeing that relatively tiny sum as an obstacle to convincing the public to go along with their agenda. In a survey, the US public ranked global warming last out of 22 issues they wanted the government to focus on, and 63% of all broadcast meteorologists believe natural factors are more important than man, while 27% believe AGW [anthropogenic global warming] is a scam. This infuriates the warmists and their mainstream media supporters who have pushed this issue for many years, which is why the Heartland and broadcasters are under attack. There are groups, organized and funded, trying to force local stations to fire the TV meteorologists who won't go on the air to claim that a day's record high or the warm winter or the cold winter or the record snow/flooding/drought/Hurricane Irene are due to CO2. TV stations know this is a contentious issue and, in the battle for ratings, want no part of taking a strong stance on any issue that may cause them to lose even a single eyeball (or rating point). But these groups don't care much about that. They only want their issue to win the day. I'll put away my soapbox till later. Thanks for listening. Please keep an open mind. I used to teach my students how to think, not what to think, when I was a college professor. That data was king. I am proud to say many of them went into broadcasting and forecasting and have been hugely successful. They may be the TV meteorologists in your town. They mostly came to similar conclusions on climate change. So you know...at the time I taught,the world was still thinking an ice age was coming. That talk will come back again by 2015 (a mini-ice-age, anyway)."